Seth Godin has written a characteristically efficient post on his blog about “The (stupid) diet”. He talks about the silliness of a diet where you eat all you want five days a week, and fast on weekends. He highlights how this has an obvious parallel with marketing.

I think you can push the parallel further, and explore how this kind of example has implications for renewables.

You could view it as a scenario regarding the Earth itself. We’ve had a lot of time to solve the energy problem, and let’s conceive of it as a week. Right now, we’re around mid-Thursday, maybe Friday morning. And not enough has been done – we’ve still been living it up the whole week, feasting on carbon-emitting fuels for energy, not going with more effective, more healthy alternatives. And pretty soon, the only options we’re going to have are going to be to cut a whole lot of consumption, very quickly, very drastically, whenever the planet’s resources give out. The case for renewables then becomes pretty simple:

Do you want to have a fun weekend, or not?